Strategy in Contests - An Introduction

Abstract

Strategy in Contests-an Introduction by Kai A. Konrad * Competition in which goods or rents are allocated as a function of the various efforts expended by players in trying to win these goods or rents is a very common phenomenon. A subset of examples comes from marketing, litigation, relative reward schemes or promotion tournaments in internal labor markets, beauty contests, influence activities, education filters, R&D contests, electoral competition in political markets, military conflict and sports. I survey here this type of competition which is sometimes called contest or tournament. I focus on the role of its various design aspects, such as prize structure, sequencing, nesting, repetition, elimination contests and many others. Some key insights about the nature and properties of this type of competition emerge from this analysis.

Asymmetric all-pay auctions with interdependent valuations

“…11 By replacing "increases" with "weakly increases" we obtain the following weaker monotonicity condition.…”

“…See Tullock (1980) and Lazear and Rosen (1981). For a comprehensive treatment of the literature on competitions with sunk investments, see Nitzan (1994) and Konrad (2009 (2009, 2010, 2013a, 2013b), and Xiao (2013). 3 Most of these difficulties relate to identifying players' best response sets, or the supports of players' equilibrium strategies.…”

Foundations for contest success functions

“…Most papers dealing with contest models in the literature analyze a CSF which is a special case of the additive form in (5) (Nitzan (1994), Konrad (2007)). Consequently, the present paper will be mainly concerned with deriving foundations for CSFs of this form.…”

“…This underlines that the appropriate extension depends on the application and institutional details the contest model is intended to capture. Foundations for contest success functions have been reviewed by Gar…nkel and Skaperdas (2007) and Konrad (2007). The most systematic approach has been normative and the seminal paper is Skaperdas (1996).…”

Conflict, settlement, and the shadow of the future

“…It is a dynamic contest model that draws on McBride and Skaperdas (2007). Contest models have been applied in cases of war, litigation, rent-seeking and other settings (see Konrad, 2007, for an overview of the contests literature). The main comparative static result regarding the e ect of the shadow of the future is shown to hold in this setting.…”